Fiserv, a market analytics company, has scaled back its home price projections considerably. In February, it forecast national price gains of about 4% through the end of 2011. The company’s latest prediction is for a 7.1% drop in prices between June 30, 2010 and June 30, 2011.

In fact, after five months of gains, prices in the 20 largest metro areas fell 0.2% in August, according to the latest S&P/Case-Shiller report.

The good news is, “There’ll be no vicious, self-reinforcing spiral down,” according to Mark Zandi, chief economist with Moody’s Analytics.

But, he added, “more home price declines are coming.”

He’s forecasting another 8% drop in home prices through the third quarter of 2011, which will put the total peak-to-trough decline at 34%.

New home sales continue to languish around historic lows, barely exceeding an annual rate of 307,000. Existing home sales did rise to a 4.53 million annualized rate in September, up 10% compared with a month earlier, but are still well below the boom years.

Of course, nobody is buying homes when they can’t find jobs. And still more people can’t hang on to their homes because they’re out of work.

Nearly a million homes are expected to be repossessed this year, and analysts seem to be competing to issue the most dire forecast for future foreclosure numbers.

Morgan Stanley reported that about 3.1 million borrowers are seriously delinquent with many expected to lose their homes.

Zandi said more than 4 million are in trouble with half of those expected to go to foreclosure.

And Laurie Goodman, of Amherst Securities, estimates the number of homes in danger of foreclosure at a whopping 11 million.

Real estate analyst Kyle Lundstedt of LPS Applied Analytics said serious delinquencies will continue to spike and will not return even to the current rates — which are already at peak levels — until late 2012 or early 2013.